Dodge is a form of melee mitigation where the entire meleeswing is avoided. Dodge is a passive ability possessed by all players for all classes and races. However this stat is the most important to players fulfilling a tanking role. Only close range melee attacks could be dodged; a ranged attack or a spell cannot be dodged. Players can only dodge attacks if they are facing their opponent, however a mob can dodge attacks that are from behind. Incapacitated targets (stunned for example) cannot dodge.

There are several ways that dodge is modified. You can increase you chance to dodge by increasing your dodge rating, defense, or agility which will all increase your effective chance to dodge or dodge percent(%). You can decrease your chance to be dodged with expertise. Expertise is only modified from expertise rating, some talents (such as Combat Expertise), and some passive racial traits for certain melee weapon types. Your chance to dodge a hit as well as have your hits be dodged is affected by the level of your opponent. Different classes and talent specializations will also vary the amount of dodge a player has.

Dodge generally goes into two pools that are added together: undiminished and diminished dodge. Your undiminished dodge includes your class's base dodge, dodge from any talents (such as Anticipation), and the dodge your receive from your base agility.

During this section, a level 80 protection paladin with 400/400 defense skill will be used to demonstrate the formulas. Because the example is a paladin, b has the value of 3.2685, t is 5 from 5/5 Anticipation talents, Ab is 1.7664, and d was 14.3295. These sum to 24.36% which matches the dodge found on the character screen. Additional discussion about dodge from agility and diminishing returns will be explained below.

Agility generates chance to dodge (dodge %). For level 80s, you can simply use the Rd value from the table above to find the rate. Note that the base agility (agility from your level and race) plus any agility from talents is undiminished. Agility from your gear and buffs will fall into the pool of diminished dodge. From the game interface, you can easily see what these two numbers are. Mouse over agility in the character window and the white number is your undiminished agility (this will include your talents) and the green number, if there is one, is the additional agility which will contribute dodge with diminishing returns.

Following our paladin example again, the paladin has a base agility of 92 and 22 additional agility from the [Frosthide Leg Armor] leatherworking enchantment. 92 at a rate of 52.083333 for paladins results in 1.7664% dodge from base agility (Ab). The additional 22 agility from gear adds 0.4224% dodge (Au), but will be subject to diminishing returns later on in the calculation.

Defense skill, similar to weapon skill, is learned from attacking mobs. If your character is level 80 and 400/400 defense skill, your dodge is not modified. However, if your defense skill is not maxxed yet, your Ab calculation actually needs to take this into account.

Defense rating, the defense from your gear and enchantments, also contributes dodge into the diminishing returns pool (Fu). First convert your defense rating to defense skill. At level 80, this is 4.92 for all classes (Rf). It's important that you floor the defense skill before continuing with the calculation. From your defense skill, you can calculated the undiminished dodge to add to the pool.

Following the example paladin again, she has 707 defense rating, divided by 4.92 and floored is 143 defense skill. (Note that defense skill accrued from defense rating is not affected by diminishing returns. Diminishing returns only applies to the additional dodge, parry, miss, and block chance from the defense skill.) This defense skill multiplied by 0.04 equals another 5.72% dodge added to the diminishing returns pool.

The final step to solving d from the original equation is diminishing returns. Now we can total the pool that came from all three sources of dodge impacted by diminishing returns: agility from gear, defense rating, and dodge rating.

For our example paladin, this is 0.4224 + 5.72 + 10.21 to equal 16.35% of undiminished dodge. Now we apply the diminishing returns formula to calculate d.

Cd is the cap for dodge, and k is a constant, and these both vary per class. Using our example paladin, Cd is 88.129021 and k is 0.9560 for paladins. Calculate the equation and the result should is 14.32% of dodge as expected.

Summons an entire legion of Ghouls to fight for the Death Knight. The Ghouls will swarm the area, taunting and fighting anything they can. While channeling Army of the Dead, the Death Knight takes less damage equal to his Dodge plus Parry chance.

Strike the target for 150% weapon damage plus (150 * AP * 10 / 10000). Only usable after the Death Knight dodges or parries. Can't be Dodged, blocked, or parried. This attack causes a high amount of threat.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street, the Lead System Designer, posted about the upcoming changes in Patch 3.2.0 on the official forums. It was in response to some carefully researched numbers showing how overall avoidance was being lowered, and disproportionately to various tank classes:

The main goal of the change was to make parry not so much less attractive than dodge as an avoidance stat. Since tank avoidance is so high already, we wanted to do that by nerfing dodge a little, not by buffing parry.

This hurts druids slightly more than other tanks, but the emphasis is on "slightly." This is not the big druid nerf that some forum posters have predicted. We will continue to evaluate tank survivability and threat generation based on PTR tests with "Patchwerk" to decide if druids need to be nerfed or DKs buffed or look at Protwarrior dps or anything else.

This is also not the big avoidance "come to Naaru" that some posters predicted. Overall, we think avoidance is too high and the game would work better with lower tank avoidance, but suddenly dropping everyone's avoidance by 20 or 30% would be a very big change with many ramifications for healing and gear among other things. It would also feel like a big nerf to the many players who didn't understand why it would be better for the game in the long term. But I still expect it is coming at some point.

The amount of agility required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This change required recalibrating the amount of dodge a player has with 0 agility by a slight amount as well, so all players will see their dodge percentage vary a small amount.

The amount of dodge rating required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply.

Patch 1.3.0 (07-Mar-2005): Every time a creature Dodges, it will report a Dodge. We will no longer translate a creature's Dodge of a rear attack to a "Miss."